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It was during college at the University of St. Thomas in 1997 where Chris Scotch and Blane Tetreault first met one another as students and athletes.

When Tetreault returned to UST as a football coach from 2005-2012, he became challenged and frustrated with the archaic process of recruiting — so he teamed up with Scotch once again.

Together, they conspired a new way of collecting thorough and accurate information on high school athletes called Preptree.

“Some coaches might have a dozen players considering numerous different colleges,” Scotch says. “It’s a very disparate process for the stakeholders with lots of inefficiency.”

Preptree works by streamlining player profiles with data — stats and vitals — for each individual player. It puts this information at the hands of recruiters from various collegiate programs, replacing the spreadsheets and three ring binders coaches and recruiters has come to rely on over the years.

Scotch is clear to point out that Preptree is not a recruiting service, per se, as their primary focus is on standardizing and aggregating the player’s respective data for recuriters and other services to leverage.

“Our platform is enabling recruits to connect with colleges via high schools to assure the best possible matches are established.”

He estimates there are over 1,100,000 high school football players (all grade levels) with 859 college football programs in US. Preptree is starting with football with the vision is to be the leading athletics-based network for recruits, high schools and colleges in the United States and abroad.

The service has launched in Minnesota for football teams and since become the official recruiting data provider for the Minnesota High School Football Coaches Association. Their venture is self-funded to date and free for all users, with plans to monetize under a subscription model eventually, along with expanding into other sports genres.

“Our drive is for Preptree to become the standard in high school athletics recruiting,” Scotch concludes.